Hardware Insights Forum

I have a dual core Dell machine here, and it's almost perfectly flawless cap-wise. Sanyo, Rubycon, Chemi-Con KMG, some Panny's. The only bad ones are all the caps next to the RAM. They're all KZJ, yuck! As of now, none of them are bulging but I want to replace them since they already have 6 and a half years of use. They're all 820uF 6.3V. I have some poly caps that are 820uF 2.5V (Fujitsu bumblebees), I'm wondering if this is too low of a voltage. Since the DDR2 RAM runs at 1.8V will I be okay using these or is it not suitable since they're fed power by the 3.3V rail?

Pentium wrote:They're all 820uF 6.3V. I have some poly caps that are 820uF 2.5V (Fujitsu bumblebees), I'm wondering if this is too low of a voltage. Since the DDR2 RAM runs at 1.8V will I be okay using these or is it not suitable since they're fed power by the 3.3V rail?

Measure the voltage across them in operation (if the board stays powered on even with the CPU removed, that helps). If it's indeed 1.8V, you can use them. Anything higher and you should obtain 6.3V caps.

The voltage measured across them was 1.794V so I went ahead and replaced all 6 of them. Out of the 6, 5 were out of spec! They were probably going to bulge soon. I also replaced 2 KZG caps, they were going out of spec as well. So far running Memtest, it's looking good! Thanks for the reply. I can be confident now that this board will last for a very long time

And after 4 hours of Memtest (All 4 RAM slots filled) with no errors, I will assume that this thing isn't going to be having any issues

Cool. KZG do often fail without bulging. I've seen that happen several times in the past.